Who wants to play the status game?

This is a good analysis, going to the core of the issue.but:

>> all you can do is push it underground (as in, "I'm so important that I don't even need to play" or "I disdain all who play, and am therefore superior to the rabble who do"), which doesn't solve anything.

It's possible to teach people humility.

And it's not pushing it underground - It's a good social skill to have if you want to collaborate with other people.

> I don't know about most people, but I'm definitely more interested in playing the collaboration game. And, I tend to overlook people who aren't into it.

Hm, but the way you're describing it, that's just the Importance Game. All you're doing is measuring someone's importance based on their intent to play the Collaboration Game.

Don't get me wrong, I think that's one of the best forms of the Importance Game, because it sort of approximates the Collaboration Game. But I think you can do better at the Collaboration Game by acknowledging that the Importance Game is unavoidable, and that you're playing it.

First, I think you're overestimating the importance of other people's intentions. Even if someone's intent is to play the Importance Game, not the Collaboration Game, you can still collaborate with them. You just have to figure out how to get them to collaborate: either by playing the Importance Game or by playing the Leveling Game. If you only collaborate with people who are trying to play the Collaboration Game, you're missing out on most opportunities to collaborate--that's a losing strategy in the Collaboration Game.

Second, I think you have to view mastering the Importance Game and Leveling Game as necessary prerequisites to mastering the Collaboration Game. This is the only way to actually step outside the Importance and Leveling Games: if you pretend you don't have to play them, you just play them unconsciously and they control your behavior. Instead, if you learn to play these games consciously, you can chose to play them when they are appropriate tools for winning in the Collaboration Game.

This is, of course, easier said than done. I don't buy that human political organization is fundamentally hierarchical, but I think that there are deeply-ingrained evolutionary mechanisms in humans that make it very hard for us to avoid viewing others and ourselves hierarchically.

A final note: the Collaboration Game still isn't the ultimate game: collaboration is only useful toward a goal, and that begs the question: what goal? That's a deeply personal question, and the Collaboration Game becomes dissatisfying if you are collaborating toward other people's goals, and never achieving your own goals. The Collaboration Game, if you focus on it too far, is called codependency. In short: the Collaboration Game is still just a sub-game in the Self-Actualization Game.

I find myself playing the Leveling Game with cleaners, drivers, etc. and talking about the football team or similar. But it also feels the most preening kind of status assertion — like Harvard grads telling you they went to school “in Boston.” The worst offender is Warren Buffett, whose self professed lifestyle of a $100K house and McDonalds which is just a way of saying “I’m so superior to you that the granite countertops and Michelin restaurants you lust over and will never afford are so meaningless to my amazingly enlightened soul that I could have them for free and don’t bother.”

> there ARE times when it helps to be able to quickly convey to new acquaintances that you are legitimate

There was a thread on HN about shibboleths. It was kicked off by someone who pointed out that tech support took them seriously and skipped the basic "have you tried turning it off and on" steps when they saw XCode was installed.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1201003855770607618

Not really. As a shy person, I've been playing it my whole life. For some reason, people meet me and assume... I dunno, that I'm just someone who can be swept aside. I let them believe that.

But I'm a lot more capable than people give me credit for being, and I'll be honest, a part of me enjoys it when that realization starts to set in.

It's not really a machiavellian ploy on my part to optimize some kind of social outcome, just a pattern I've settled into. It's fine for most aspects of my life. Good for poker games with strangers. Bad for first dates and FAANG-style job interviews, where I excessively downplay my abilities.

However, I think generally in life you shouldn't try to "be" anything except healthier and kinder. You were given a role in life, and it is up to you to play it to your best ability. I'm paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, I think, when I say be careful who you pretend to be -- because that might be the person you become.

Consciously playing social games is foolish. What you really want in life is inside of you. Strive to be better, not to find artificial ways to dominate others.